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It would be impossible to cover any news this month without acknowledging <a href="https://www.economist.com/ukraine-crisis" target="_blank">the crisis in Ukraine</a>. 
As many CMS and DXP vendors rely on the incredible talent and resources of the people in this region, the events of the last few weeks have hit especially close to home. Even as we publish our February recap, things continue to unfold – and our hearts go out to the people of this magnificent country.
Of course, this tragedy is evolving just as many countries are emerging from the worst of the <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-services/our-insights/when-will-the-covid-19-pandemic-end" target="_blank">Covid-19 pandemic</a>, with many businesses poised for a return to normalcy (what that looks like still remains to be seen). Still, the lasting impact of the omnichannel revolution is being felt across all digital transformation strategies, giving way to more headless, composable, API-driven solutions as companies plan for a more digital future.
When it comes to movers and shakers, 2022 is starting much the same way as 2021: with big investments.
<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/bloomreach-reaches-2-2-billion-valuation-following-175-million-investment-from-goldman-sachs/">Bloomreach</a>, a leading content and search platform focused on commerce, announced a $175 million round of funding – exploding its valuation to $2.2 billion. <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/elastic-path-secures-60m-in-funding-for-composable-commerce-growth/">Elastic Path</a> also made waves by securing $60 million in financing to grow its composable commerce solutions. We also saw <a href="https://www.pymnts.com/acquisitions/2022/ecommerce-platform-bigcommerce-acquires-software-firm-b2b-ninja/" target="_blank">BigCommerce</a> purchase B2B Ninja, an e-commerce platform, in an effort to energize quoting and other commerce services in their ecosystem. (Hint: we have more investment news below...)
As always, we try to recap some of the news you might have missed this month. There's a lot happening across our industry, and on a brighter note, we'll be announcing the winners of the CMS Critic Awards next week – both the People's Choice and Editor's Choice categories. We had a lot of great engagement over the last month across our social channels, and we're looking forward to sharing the results. 
<h2>Twilio Segment releases its 2022 CDP Report, finds CDPs booming as businesses look beyond cookies</h2>
We're all asking the same question: what happens to data in a post-cookie world?
Segment – a leading customer data platform (CDP) purchased by Twilio<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/twilio-acquires-segment-for-3-2b-adds-market-leading-cdp-for-building-data-driven-apps/" target="_blank"> in November of 2020</a> – is helping to shed some light on that query with the release of its third annual <a href="https://segment.com/the-cdp-report" target="_blank">Customer Data Platform Report </a>(CDP).
Based on anonymized platform usage data of Segment's 25,000+ customers between 11/1/2020 to 11/1/2021, the report finds aggressive adoption of CDPs over the past year as businesses build digital-first customer engagement strategies and reduce their reliance on third-party data. 
Covid-19 shifted consumer behavior on a number of levels. In response, organizations changed how they interacted with their customers. As more digital engagements ensued, so too did the amount of data being generated. This spurred an explosive demand for CDP layers, particularly as it related to the broader CMS and DXP ecosystems.
Along with the unimaginable growth in data, the volume of API calls has also skyrocketed. <a href="https://www.postman.com/" target="_blank">Postman</a> – a leading application platform for API testing – conducted a <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/postman-releases-2021-state-of-the-api-report-shows-global-trend-towards-api-first-digital-era/" target="_blank">survey</a> last year that showed the world is moving to an "API-first era" as integrations and endpoints expand exponentially. As an example, the API calls through Segment have been growing steadily year-over-year since 2017, but 2020-2021 was an inflection point – with API calls in their system reaching over 1 trillion per month. 
Another reason CDP popularity has rapidly exploded is the impending "death" of third-party data. With increasing privacy regulations and the shift to a cookieless future across apps and browsers, businesses are embracing first-party data as a focal point. 
Segment's findings validate that customer data has become an integral part of how organizations are powering their digital experiences. The report also lists 2021's fastest-growing apps. For more details, you can access the full report at: <a href="https://segment.com/the-cdp-report" target="_blank">https://segment.com/the-cdp-report</a>.
<h2>Headless commerce provider fabric announces $140 Million Series C funding led by SoftBank</h2>
<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/top-headless-commerce-platforms/" target="_blank">fabric</a>, the fast-growing headless commerce platform, announced the closing of a Series C funding round of $140M led by Softbank, with participation from Forerunner Ventures, Glynn Capital, and existing investors Redpoint Ventures Norwest Ventures, and Stripes. 
This latest round of funding closes a mere 219 days after its Series B – and now positions fabric's value at approximately $1.5B.
"Retailers need to meet modern consumers wherever they are – whether online, offline, mobile, social, or any future entry point. This means merchants of all sizes, and especially mid-market and enterprise, need the right commerce platform to keep pace with evolving trends," said Robert Kaplan, Investment Director at SoftBank Investment Advisers. "We believe that fabric has built the industry's best API-first modular commerce platform and accompanying commerce applications to give merchants unrivaled power and flexibility, all in a manner that reduces the pain of migrating over from legacy, outdated commerce platforms."
Funds from the Series C round will be utilized for accelerating product development largely through automation and intelligence and geographic expansion. 
<h2>Netlify announces Netlify Graph: A faster way for teams to develop web apps with APIs</h2>
Netlify, a Git-powered static site generator and headless CMS that's all the rage in the <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/top-jamstack-static-site-generators-for-2021/">Jamstack</a> community, has <a href="https://www.netlify.com/blog/announcing-netlify-graph-a-faster-way-for-teams-to-develop-web-apps-with-apis" target="_blank">announced Netlify Graph:</a> a GraphQL-powered experience designed to help developers build interactive and connected web applications faster.
The shift to API-first development has created an ecosystem where apps are modular and reusable. While the API-first approach is developer-friendly, it has also introduced new complexities such as discovering, securing, learning, and governing APIs. Netlify's Graph is designed to make this experience easier for developers, allowing them to use APIs without writing undifferentiated glue code, learning every API's unique structure, or composing endless amounts of endpoints to get data from various APIs into your app.
Netlify Graph is in public beta and available globally. It starts with a catalog that includes some of the most frequently requested APIs that development teams use, such as GitHub, Stripe, and Salesforce. The company plans to add more in the coming months. The Netlify Graph beta is available to all Netlify users and can be accessed from your <a href="https://app.netlify.com/" target="_blank">Netlify team dashboard</a>. Once logged in, simply select "Graph" from your Netlify site dashboard menu.
To learn more, head over to the <a href="https://github.com/netlify/labs/tree/main/features/graph/documentation" target="_blank">Netlify Graph docs.</a>
<h2>BigCommerce acquires B2B Ninja to make online selling easier for B2B merchants</h2>
<a href="https://www.bigcommerce.com/?utm_source=Business+Wire&amp;utm_medium=press+release&amp;utm_campaign=BigCommerce+Invests+in+Becoming+World%E2%80%99s+Most+Powerful+B2B+Ecommerce+Platform+with+Acquisition+of+B2B+Ninja" target="_blank">BigCommerce</a>, a leading cloud e-commerce platform, <a href="https://www.bigcommerce.com/press/releases/bigcommerce-invests-in-becoming-worlds-most-powerful-b2b-ecommerce-platform-with-acquisition-of-b2b-ninja/" target="_blank">announced</a> the acquisition of <a href="https://www.b2bninja.com/" target="_blank">B2B Ninja</a> (formerly Quote Ninja) – an enterprise software solution that provides leading business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce capabilities for merchants of all sizes.
<a href="https://www.forrester.com/playbook/The+B2B+eCommerce+Playbook+For+2018/-/E-PLA370" target="_blank">According to Forrester</a>, U.S. B2B e-commerce transactions are expected to reach $1.8 trillion by 2023. This is creating a groundswell of opportunity for e-commerce platform providers to deliver focused solutions to this segment of the market. A longtime BigCommerce partner, B2B Ninja brings its best-in-class quoting solution to help streamline transactions by delivering powerful e-commerce functionality to B2B merchants.
"B2B Ninja is an excellent addition to our already strong B2B capabilities," said Brent Bellm, CEO of BigCommerce. "Complementing our recent launch of B2B Edition, this is the next big step in providing a platform that is easier to use and faster than legacy B2B solutions and more flexible and powerful than other SaaS platforms. We continue to invest in ways that make BigCommerce the best platform for merchants of all sizes regardless of who or where their customers are or where merchants are selling."
B2B Ninja is available to any BigCommerce merchant on any plan to enhance the customer experience and easily manage quotes online.

CMS Monthly Recap: Big Investment News, Segment Releases 2022 CDP Report, Netlify Graph Launches and More

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Top Headless Commerce Platforms

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While COVID-19 continues to impact markets globally, the CMS world has been on a binge of buying, partnering, and releasing new features.
In case you’ve been distracted over the last few weeks by a chaotic news cycle and a U.S. presidential election, here’s a quick recap of what’s been happening in the content management and digital experience world.
<h3>Hyland Completes Acquisition of Alfresco</h3>
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Recently, <a href="https://www.hyland.com/">Hyland</a> the enterprise content management (ECM) provider <a href="/hyland-acquires-alfresco-focuses-on-cloud-and-global-expansion-of-enterprise-cms/">announced</a> that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire <a href="https://www.alfresco.com/">Alfresco Software</a> – an open-source content services platform.
Last week, Hyland <a href="https://news.hyland.com/hyland-completes-acquisition-of-alfresco/">completed</a> the transaction, bringing the entire Alfresco business, including all technology and products, under the Hyland umbrella.
“At Hyland, the Alfresco platform will continue to grow and to serve customers’ evolving business needs,” said Bill Priemer, Hyland’s President and Chief Executive Office. “Alfresco customers can confidently continue to use and expand their Alfresco solutions, whether deployed on-premises or in the cloud.”
Future Alfresco versions will enable customers to seamlessly leverage other areas of the Hyland portfolio. These include the Hyland Experience Platform (HxP) — the recently launched, next-generation, cloud-based platform — and newly developed HxP components, such as <a href="https://www.hyland.com/en/platform/product-suite/HxC">Hyland Experience Capture</a>.
<h3>Episerver Completes Acquisition of Optimizely</h3>
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In a big move to evolve their personalization strategy, <a href="https://www.episerver.com/">Episerver</a>, the customer-centric digital experience platform, recently <a href="/episerver-to-acquire-optimizely-the-worlds-leading-experience-optimization-platform/">announced</a> its plans to buy <a href="https://www.optimizely.com/">Optimizely</a> – a leading A/B and multivariate testing platform. A few weeks ago, Episerver <a href="https://www.episerver.com/company/press-room/episerver-completes-acquisition-of-optimizely">completed</a> the acquisition.
“With its acquisition of Optimizely, as with its acquisitions of Idio and Insite in 2019, Episerver substantially increases the value proposition that the company offers to enterprise brands,” said Jacob Groshek, research manager, Digital Experience Management, at IDC. “The Optimizely acquisition adds AI-based experimentation and optimization to the Episerver portfolio. The purchase of Optimizely not only augments Episerver's capacity to automatically deliver personalized content as a central component of users' digital experiences, it also adds another layer of behavioral intelligence for organizations.”
Following the close, Episerver now serves approximately 9,000 customers and more than 900 partners globally in segments including retail, manufacturing &amp; distribution, financial services, insurance, healthcare, media, and technology, among others.
As part of Episerver, the Optimizely progressive delivery and experimentation platform will continue to support customers as a standalone solution, but will also be available as part of Episerver’s offerings immediately.
<h3>Acquia Announces Major Updates to Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP)</h3>
<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/drupal_9_dxp_0-1.jpg" srcset="/wp-content/themes/cmscritic/img/cmscritic/content/images/size/w600/2020/11/drupal_9_dxp_0-1.jpg 600w, /wp-content/themes/cmscritic/img/cmscritic/content/images/size/w1000/2020/11/drupal_9_dxp_0-1.jpg 1000w, /wp-content/themes/cmscritic/img/cmscritic/content/images/size/w1600/2020/11/drupal_9_dxp_0-1.jpg 1600w, /wp-content/themes/cmscritic/img/cmscritic/content/images/2020/11/drupal_9_dxp_0-1.jpg 1920w" /></figure>
After <a href="/acquia-launches-new-open-digital-experience-platform/">launching</a> its new Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP) this July, <a href="https://www.acquia.com/">Acquia</a> has accelerated their innovation by leaps and bounds. In fact, they recently <a href="https://www.acquia.com/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/acquia-announces-major-updates-open-digital-experience-platform">announced</a> major upgrades to their Drupal Cloud and Marketing Cloud.
So, what are these major upgrades? For starters, on the Drupal Cloud side, they <a href="https://www.acquia.com/drupal9">transitioned from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9</a>. For developers, these enhancements focus on decreasing the time to build, design, and run sites and applications.
Following the successful launch of Drupal 9 in June, the new <a href="https://www.acquia.com/drupal9/accelerate-your-migration">Acquia Migration Accelerator</a> tool significantly reduces the effort tied to a transition from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9. Currently in beta, the tool reduces time to value for Drupal 9 by providing a user-friendly interface to streamline analysis and planning, DevOps, data imports, and content auditing for migrations.
Once organizations are migrated, the new <a href="https://www.acquia.com/products/drupal-cloud/cloud-ide">Acquia Cloud IDE</a> makes it faster than ever to build Drupal sites and applications, with one-click access to a cloud-hosted development and testing environment. Acquia Cloud IDE integrates with existing Acquia command line and automated build tools for Drupal, making it faster and easier for developers to build and test their code – even in remote or hybrid work setups.
On the Marketing Cloud side, the major updates include new real-time 360-degree profiles, identity resolution, and unified segment capabilities within the Acquia Customer Data Platform (CDP). These capabilities aggregate data from various sources, eliminate redundancy, and unify data into a single source of the truth for real-time customer segmentation.
Finally, Acquia also added a COVID-19 dashboard that helps marketers understand their customers’ shifts from offline to online channels, as well as changes in channel preferences throughout the pandemic. The dashboard also helps marketers identify changes in product preferences, as well as opportunities for growth in their marketing campaigns.
<h3>Fabric Launches Headless Commerce Platform with $9.5 Million in Seed Funding</h3>
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<a href="https://fabric.inc/">Fabric</a>, a headless commerce platform, launched its cloud-native experience and commerce product suite and <a href="https://resources.fabric.inc/blog/seed">announced</a> $9.5 million in seed funding led by Redpoint Ventures with participation from Sierra Ventures and Expa. In addition, e-commerce executive Faisal Masud, who led multi-billion-dollar commerce businesses at Amazon, eBay, Groupon and Staples, has joined the company as CEO.
Brands struggle to compete with Amazon’s continued market dominance in the e-commerce and digital retail space. While big retailers can afford to invest heavily in their own proprietary systems, widening their advantage in data, speed, pricing and convenience, many D2C and B2B brands are challenged by the cost and complexity of modernizing their outdated commerce platforms. COVID-19 has further raised the stakes: during the pandemic, e-commerce sales have grown as much as 55% year-over-year.
“Unlike Amazon, which wins on selection, price and availability, emerging and growing D2C and B2B companies need to win on brand and experience,” said Faisal Masud, CEO at Fabric.
Fabric’s headless commerce platform enables marketers and merchants to deliver world-class commerce experiences without the engineering burden. Its modular API-first platform enables brands to utilize tools that address their specific needs, rather than re-platforming. Fabric gives brands sophisticated capabilities with its Experience Platform Manager (XPM), Product Information Manager (PIM), pricing and offers and Order Management (OMS).
The Fabric platform offers a suite of commerce APIs that allow brands to orchestrate their offerings across all channels, enabling them to support the entire lifecycle of each customer. In addition, Fabric runs on a completely serverless infrastructure to effectively scale during high-traffic retail peaks.
<h3>Cloudinary and Contentful Partner to Help Brands Create “Visual-First” Experiences More Efficiently</h3>
<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/apps-cloudinary-dialog.png" srcset="/wp-content/themes/cmscritic/img/cmscritic/content/images/size/w600/2020/11/apps-cloudinary-dialog.png 600w, /wp-content/themes/cmscritic/img/cmscritic/content/images/size/w1000/2020/11/apps-cloudinary-dialog.png 1000w, /wp-content/themes/cmscritic/img/cmscritic/content/images/2020/11/apps-cloudinary-dialog.png 1340w" /></figure>
<a href="https://cloudinary.com/">Cloudinary</a>, the media experience platform, announced a partnership with <a href="https://www.contentful.com/">Contentful</a>, a headless content management system (CMS). The new partnership offers Contentful users seamless access to Cloudinary’s award-winning media experience solutions, including its headless digital asset management (DAM) within Contentful’s CMS – allowing Contentful users to more easily upload, optimize and deliver engaging visual-first experiences at scale.
"In today's visual economy, fast and flawless rich media experiences are no longer a nice to have, they are critical components to any company’s success,” said Scott Doughman, vice president of Business Development at Cloudinary. “Equally critical is the ability to deliver the right, high-performant content as efficiently as possible to eliminate the challenges that often keep experiences from reaching their true engagement potential. The Contentful-Cloudinary integration eliminates these challenges and we’re pleased to be bringing our media management expertise to the Contentful ecosystem."
With the API-first approach of Cloudinary and Contentful, you can now build a seamlessly-integrated, future-proof stack with your preferred development frameworks and platforms.
<h3>Microsoft Announces Clarity, a Free Visitor Behavior Analytics Platform</h3>
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The elder statesman of the digital realm, <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/">Microsoft</a> continues to shock and awe the experience and development fiefdoms with bold moves – including their acquisitions of both <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/">LinkedIn</a> and <a href="https://github.com/">GitHub</a>.
Now, Microsoft has announced a resource that will have an impact on digital experience in the usability, governance, and analytics categories. With <a href="https://clarity.microsoft.com/">Microsoft Clarity</a>, website and content owners will now have access to a GDPR compliant, free-to-use analytics tool to help improve their website experiences by better understanding their visitors' behaviors.
Microsoft Clarity has three main features: heatmaps, session playbacks, and an insights dashboard. Because of their unique delivery, Clarity’s tools won’t negatively impact a website's latency, and can handle variable traffic without incurring additional costs.
Clarity’s heatmaps come in two forms: clickmaps and scrollmaps. The combination will allow users to qualify behavior and trends, and make it easy to provide data-driven justifications for design decisions. The session playbacks allow site managers to record page visits and track where visitors clicked and scrolled, and the insights dashboard provides an overall understanding of the traffic to your site.
<h3>Contentsquare Acquires Dareboost And Launches Find &amp; Fix Product to Solve Revenue-Killing Errors</h3>
<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/contentsquare-dareboost.png" srcset="/wp-content/themes/cmscritic/img/cmscritic/content/images/size/w600/2020/11/contentsquare-dareboost.png 600w, /wp-content/themes/cmscritic/img/cmscritic/content/images/size/w1000/2020/11/contentsquare-dareboost.png 1000w, /wp-content/themes/cmscritic/img/cmscritic/content/images/size/w1600/2020/11/contentsquare-dareboost.png 1600w, /wp-content/themes/cmscritic/img/cmscritic/content/images/2020/11/contentsquare-dareboost.png 1755w" /></figure>
<a href="https://contentsquare.com/">Contentsquare</a>, the Digital Experience Analytics (DXP Analytics) company, <a href="https://contentsquare.com/blog/contentsquare-acquires-dareboost-and-launches-find-fix-product-to-solve-revenue-killing-errors/">announced</a> its acquisition of <a href="https://www.dareboost.com/en">Dareboost</a>, an online tool to test, analyze and monitor websites. Dareboost has been a Find &amp; Fix product for Contentsquare. The integration breaks silos between marketing and IT teams, as well as the rest of a business.
The core capabilities of the new Contentsquare Find &amp; Fix product include web performance monitoring and scoring, error reporting and impact quantification, advanced retroactive search, advanced APM integrations, and comparison and benchmarking capabilities.
<h3>Mediafly Acquires Presentify to Transform Marketing and Sales Content</h3>
<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/sap_mediafly_cloud_diagram.png" srcset="/wp-content/themes/cmscritic/img/cmscritic/content/images/size/w600/2020/11/SAP_Mediafly_Cloud_Diagram.png 600w, /wp-content/themes/cmscritic/img/cmscritic/content/images/size/w1000/2020/11/SAP_Mediafly_Cloud_Diagram.png 1000w, /wp-content/themes/cmscritic/img/cmscritic/content/images/2020/11/SAP_Mediafly_Cloud_Diagram.png 1280w" /></figure>
<a href="https://www.mediafly.com/">Mediafly</a> – a provider of sales enablement technology, content management, and advisory services that create interactive, value-based selling experiences – <a href="https://www.mediafly.com/mediafly-acquires-presentify/">announced</a> its acquisition of <a href="https://www.presentify.co.uk/">Presentify</a>, a global visual communication solution.
By adding Presentify’s capabilities, Mediafly users can now build “selling stories” using sophisticated visual communication capabilities all through the Mediafly app – which natively supports the most advanced content formats, animations and modularized assets for elevated sales storytelling.
“More companies are recognizing the need for digital sales transformation, and the importance of using a modern sales enablement platform. But all too often they don’t want to take their antiquated, boring sales content and put it into a sophisticated sales app for fear of garbage in, garbage out,” said Carson Conant, CEO and founder of Mediafly. “With Presentify, Mediafly now tears down the barrier of entry for these companies, allowing them to quickly refresh their sales stories with interactive, animated content — and learn the ‘Presentification’ techniques to create and maintain sales collateral that is a league above their competition.”
And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for another installment next month.

CMS Monthly Recap: Acquia Gets Feature Boosts, Cloudinary and Contentful Partner, Big Acquisition Updates and More

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Explore a wide range of informative articles on fabric, insights, and industry updates. Stay informed and ahead of the curve with our diverse collection of news and posts covering the latest trends and developments in the industry